Kevin Macdonald, Jude Law and Focus Features team up for sunken treasure thriller 'Black Sea'

Filmmaker Kevin Macdonald is about to go deep sea diving with Jude Law. Deadline reports that the film "Black Sea" has been positioned as his next with Law in the lead as a laid-off submarine captain who gets involved in a scheme to seek out a storied sunken sub that might be loaded with gold in the Black Sea.

I've been a pretty big fan of Macdonald's from the start. He won an Oscar in 2000 for his documentary feature "One Day in September," which told the story of the 1972 Munich Olympics tragedy six years before Steven Spielberg's "Munich" came along. His gripping 2003 documentary/narrative hybrid "Touching the Void" was one of my favorite films of that year, and as he transitioned to full-on narrative filmmaking with 2006's "The Last King of Scotland," I remained impressed; it, too, was one of the best films of the year, in my opinion, and it won Forest Whitaker an Oscar for Best Actor.

Macdonald has continued to dabble in documentaries, like 2011's groundbreaking "Life in a Day" (an idea to be revisited with the upcoming "Christmas in a Day") and with the rather brilliant Bob Marley study "Marley" last year. He has another narrative feature, "How I Live Now," starring Saoirse Ronan and "The Impossible"'s Tom Holland, looking for a buyer currently, but Focus Features has already sprung for his next, and it sounds pretty sweet.

The film is to be written by Dennis Kelly, whose musical adaptation of Roald Dahl's "Matilda" has been the talk of Broadway. Film 4 developed, co-produced and is co-financing the project with Focus.

It was also announced recently that Focus has acquired the Ron Woodruff biopic "Dallas Buyers Club" for 2013 release.

Get the latest In Contention news delivered to your inbox as it happens.

Kristopher Tapley has covered the film awards landscape for over a decade. He founded In Contention in 2005. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Times of London and Variety. He begs you not to take any of this too seriously.